This post continues and completes the earlier part of the tutorial. Once again, I’m not an expert painter but always try to speed paint to a reasonable tabletop quality. If you recall we left the half painted Anglian Miniatures Moroccan drying after applying a chestnut brown ink wash.

This left the figure looking rather dark and very shiny because of the wax in the Klear floor polish I used. That’s fine though because once the wash dries you’ll have a very stable, hard coat you can easily paint over.

5. Painting Over the Magic Wash. The point of the chestnut ink wash was to define the folds and edges in the figure. In a sense the quick ink wash provides a similar effect to the ‘black lining’ others paint with. This is where you prime your figure black and build up the colours over that while leaving thin black lines between the various areas of the figure.

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Asus recently released their Asus Eee. This is a tiny Celeron based laptop running a Xandros Linux variant and it retails for $600nzd locally at Dick Smith. Detailed specifications are on the Asus site.

I’ve been after a cheap secondary PC for a while so I grabbed a 4Gb Eee the day they were released in New Zealand. They’re excellent value for the price and the Eee is the first laptop I’ve owned that is light enough to be carried to and from work every day in my satchel.

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Christmas approaches and this year we’ll be celebrating at my wife’s family farm. Down there they have a tradition that goes some way towards rejecting the crass commercialism that usually surrounds this holiday: every year you draw a single family member out of the hat and you’re expected to make a present for that person.

Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t because, like any family, there’s a couple of people that are difficult to make things for! Fortunately I drew my father-in-law this time and he’s an avid collector of Hornby Dublo tin-plate trains. I thought my hobby was expensive until I learned he’s quite happy to pay in the region of $400nzd+ for a single antique 1930’s tin-plate Hornby Dublo steam train in working condition.

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As the poll has ended, it’s time I showed I’ve made some progress on the Hirst Arts Cathedral: thus I give you the floor!

This is little more exciting than it sounds because it gives me a foundation to build the rest of the Cathedral on. There’s a couple of 28mm Games Workshop Mordheim figures on there for scale.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bruce Hirst’s Cathedral design, the floor is split into two parts to allow you to get inside the assembled Cathedral for detailing, painting and gaming. The split is cunningly placed, falling between the main room and one gallery of the final building. I may just build up the walls and towers for this smaller gallery first to see if the water based Selley’s Liquid Nails I picked up recently does a better job of holding the bricks together than builder’s PVA.

There are a few issues however. The first is that the join between the smaller and larger pieces isn’t quite exact and there’s a visible ~1mm seam between the floor tiles when the two parts are placed together. However hopefully that’ll be concealed once I’ve built up the walls.

The second issue is that I’ve glued the floor down on a single layer of 3mm MDF which is definitely not going to be rigid enough to support the finished Cathedral. I plan to ply 2-3 layers of 3mm MDF together with PVA and clamps to build up a set of shallow stepped levels up around the Cathedral. Hopefully that works since I’ve already glued down the floor!

Yes, I read all instructions and carefully plan all of my projects…

Which Unfinished Project Next?

* 26% (28) – Mordheim Cathedral
* 18% (19) – Second Facade
* 17% (18) – DAK Germans
* 11% (12) – Vampire Tower
* 9% (9) – Mordheim Church
* 8% (9) – Dragon Paratroopers
* 7% (8) – Carthaginians
* 5% (5)- Early Romans

Total Votes: 108

In the immortal words of Bill the Cat: Ack!

I should have know when I started this poll that you, my gentle visitors would vote for the largest, most complex outstanding project I have in the garage. I can only think you’re mostly Hirst Arts fans, or you’re mostly sadists!

At any rate I’m closing this poll with my Hirst Arts Cathedral project being the clear winner, followed by the second 15mm building facade. I’ve started working on the Cathedral again and hope to have the basic floor glued down this week, naturally I’ll post that once it’s done.

Unfortunately, despite the fact the last poll was an effort to pick an existing unfinished project to complete, I’ve just started another new project! Fortunately this one will be fairly quick to do and has a strict deadline. I’ll post about that this week too.